Izenberg: If NFL lockout lingers, stadium workers are the real losers

John O'Boyle/The Star-LedgerJets coach Rex Ryan greets fans at New Meadowlands Stadium during a game last season. If the NFL lockout keeps those fans out of their seats next season, stadium workers will miss out on their paychecks.

From Aug. 12, 1994, to April 2, 1995, Major League Baseball players and owners fought ferociously for 232 days in the longest work stoppage of any major-league sport in history. It also led to cancellation of a World Series. No league had ever before failed to play its championship game — not the NFL, not the NBA, not the NHL.

Gate receipts were lost. Paychecks were lost. Owners wore their anger on their sleeves. Players whined. Fans took sides.

And nobody, absolutely nobody, gave a thought to the hardest-hit, least glamorous blue-collar victims of a strike from which, squeezed between owners and players, they could only lose — and they did.

This is the story of one survivor of that baseball strike. He called himself Pittsburgh Bruce for reasons of his own. He was a hustler and a fan of everything that was Pittsburgh sports, from high school football to the Steelers, from the Pirates to the Penguins and on to the University of Pittsburgh.

Owners and players said they were under terrific pressure then. Owner and players in the NFL today say the same thing about this work stoppage.

Strike or lockout. It’s all the same. You want to understand real-world, toss-in-your-sleep-and-stare-at-the-monthly-bills pressure? I don’t know where he is today, but Pittsburgh Bruce could sure as hell tell you how it was for the foot soldiers of the concession stands without a players association, without an ownership stake, without so much as a nickel in the quarter that was the battle between multi-millionaires.

Bruce started hawking beer and programs out at old Three Rivers Stadium in 1971, which made him, at age 40, one of the most senior hustlers in the joint the year of the baseball strike. On good days before this strike, you could find him at the program stand on the ramp just beyond Gate A, which faces Roberto Clemente’s statue. On days when the Pirates did not expect to draw at least 25,000, they would shut his stand, giving him the option to go into the seats and sell beer.

“That’s when it gets tough,” he told me. “The Pirates shut off their beer sales after the fifth inning. You need a lot of sun and a lot of thirsty people to make that pay off for you.”

Forget the NFL owners and forget the players. Hell, they forgot you a long time ago just like baseball did in a long, long strike. Think, instead, about this army of honest workmen who would lose everything if the master puppeteers make this a battle forever the major part of the upcoming calendar of autumn Sundays.

They will be the anonymous “civilian” casualties.

To understand the pressure that would squeeze the modest budgets of stadium vendors facing unemployment through no fault of their own, just listen to what Bruce told me back then about how tough it was at old Three Rivers in the wake of that strike.

“I’m single,” he told me. “I know how to hustle. I get by. But I got a couple school teachers who work with me. Hustling at baseball games is part of their family budget. Summers at Three Rivers is their family vacation money or maybe it’s their kid’s dental bill or maybe … well, you get the idea.” Those guys were hurting, and when it was over, took a long time to get out of debt. It’s hard enough to make a buck when the Pirates are going good. But when they are as lousy, as they were that year, and the crowds are down, you fight for every penny.

“Most of the souvenir stands at Three Rivers are family affairs,” he said. “There’s a guy named Tom, whose family has one of them on the first level. His kid, Dave, is going to Pitt. The kid is working with his dad for tuition money. Now the players take a hike and the owners won’t settle. Here’s a kid who wants to work, wants to go to college and, in the end, he’s scrambling for green stamps to pay his books and lab fees.”

And then he said something that every hot dog vendor, every program hustler, every guy who walks the stadium stairs and hustles beer could swear to in blood and pain if the NFL and its players push this far enough into the season:

“It was like a war, and we were just the civilians caught in the cross-fire — and civilians don’t count. You got two big money armies and they both have machine guns.

“They want the same hill and they keep on pulling the triggers. But they can’t shoot straight. They hit everyone except the guys they’re aiming at.”

That strike was finally settled. Three Rivers is long gone. I haven’t seen Bruce in nearly two decades, but the NFL labor war is real and if it keeps on going, an army of unemployed vendors will know exactly what Bruce meant when he said: